On Lloyds Banking Group 's long march to recovery, the big British bank hit an important milestone Friday.

The bank’s shares rose above 62 pence apiece. Why does that matter? Because that’s higher than the 61-pence-a-share that, by one metric at least, the British government paid back in early 2009 to rescue Lloyds after its ill-fated acquisition of mortgage lender HBOS. That bailout left U.K. taxpayers owning 39% of Lloyds’s shares.

In other words, the government is now theoretically poised to make money on its investment on Lloyds, if and when it chooses to start selling its shares.

Inside Lloyds, executives on Friday were cheerfully interpreting their shares’ torrid streak – they have more than doubled from a year ago – as confirmation of the diverging fortunes of Lloyds and its bailed-out rival, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. Shares of RBS, 81%-owned by the government, remain well below the government’s average buy-in price.

Of course, there are a variety of ways to measure exactly when the government will be in a position to profit from its Lloyds holdings.

Lloyds disclosed earlier this year that the government is holding the bank’s stock on its books at 61 pence a share. But then as we noted Monday, the government paid an average of nearly 74 pence per share of Lloyds. When you calculate the variety of fees that Lloyds has paid to the government, the buy-in price falls to about 63 pence.